Chapter 3

I didn't sleep. I sat with the photograph until sunrise, and by the time the house woke up, I'd made a decision: I was done pretending I hadn't noticed six years of my own erasure.

By morning, Isabella had moved into the west guest suite. "Temporary," Alessandro said, "until the townhouse is ready." By noon, she was sitting in on the Brooklyn meeting — a meeting built on a structure I designed six years ago — giving opinions on distribution routes like she'd always owned that chair.

I found Alessandro in his study that evening. Ledgers open on the desk. My work, in someone else's handwriting now.

"Isabella sat in on the Brooklyn meeting," I said.

"She has good instincts. Her family ran shipping out of Naples for twenty years." He didn't look up. "Useful, having someone who understands logistics."

I understand logistics. I built the logistics she's sitting inside of.

"I've run the Brooklyn accounts since Rossi," I said. "You never asked me to sit in."

He looked up then. Gentle, which made it worse. "You're my wife, Valentina. You have a beautiful house, anything you want, my name." He set down his pen. "You should be grateful. I gave you a life."

I could have let it go. I'd let it go for six years.

Instead, something in me finally said it out loud.

"And I gave you an empire."

He laughed. Not cruelly — fond, disbelieving, the laugh you give a child who's said something sweetly absurd. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and for just a second, some old part of me still wanted that to mean something.

"You've had a long night," he said. "Get some sleep."

He didn't believe me. Not for a second. And that told me everything I needed to know about the six years he thought I'd spent doing nothing but existing beautifully beside him.

I let him kiss my forehead. I walked out without another word.

It was only in the hallway, alone, that I let my hands shake — because he wasn't wrong that I'd earned every one of those ledgers. He was wrong about what that meant.

I was twenty-one when they married me off, a name attached to a treaty. I never asked for love. But somewhere in the second year, I gave it anyway — not to the Black Don the world was afraid of, but to the man who talked to me at 2 a.m. about his father, about the weight of a name he never chose. I kept his secrets for that man. I did his math at two in the morning for that man. I stayed quiet while Rossi took a bonus for a theft I found, while a nameless assistant got credit for a structure I built on hotel stationery, while a dozen small wars got won by a woman nobody in that house ever thought to thank.

I thought loyalty like that eventually got noticed.

I was halfway up the stairs, still furious with myself for hoping, when I heard his phone ring in the study behind me. His voice went low. Clipped. The voice he only used for things that mattered.

I should have kept walking.

Instead I stopped on the landing, in the dark, and listened.

"—no, I understand the concern," Alessandro said. "If Valentina's been in contact with the De Lucas, I need to know before Thursday. Every conversation, every message, going back a year."

A pause. Whatever the voice on the other end said made his tone drop several degrees.

"Then find out. And if it's true—"

He stopped.

The silence stretched long enough that my heart forgot how to beat.